griffjon

The local market has a ton of wonderful pumpkins that we're trying out recipes with. This week was the warty "Galeuse d'Eysines," which I think will get turned into something sweet (though the pumpkin fries weren't half bad). Luckily, these didn't get patented.

39286 Paseo Padre Pkwy
(between Capitol Ave & Walnut Ave)
Fremont, CA 94538
(510) 790-0999

http://www.yelp.com/biz/frodo-joes-le-petit-cafe-fremont

It's a crepe place ~2 blocks from the fremont BART station, good reviews on yelp. There's a La Pinata which also was well-reviewed at yelp nearby if things fail. Sorry for the early hour, but our plane is at noon (we thought it was at 1pm earlier); we'll be there from 9:30 through to around 10:30.

So unless any of you bay-areans have any San Jose / Fremont / Union City and environs brunch recommendations, A and I will just choose one off of Yelp; trying to be BART-friendly.

Also: any recommendations for stuff to do in the nearby area on a Friday afternoon?

I love rosemary.

Someone had trimmed back one of the overgrown shrubs of rosemary in the neighborhood, so I helped myself to the copious trimmings.

The woodsy parts and other leftover pieces go into my Bucket Of Wood to get soaked and thrown on the coals for extra smoky goodness.

The thick twigs got stripped of their leaves and saved for a future role as shrimp skewers

a good number of leaves got dried out and added to my spice stores, with some going to work diffusing into some olive oil. Some others got sauteed up in some bacon fat and spread over the hunk of steak I grilled up tonight (with some rosemary smoke, of course).

Like I said, I love rosemary.

Latest from Artists You May Like, Including Chang, Ha-Joon

Institutional Change and Economic... Paperback by United Nations University

Radio Retaliation (Bonus Track Edition) Audio CD ~ Thievery Corporation

Electronic Literacies: Language... Kindle Edition by Mark Warschauer

The Fortune at the Bottom of the... Hardcover by C.K. Prahalad


What am I, some 30-something DC policy wonky international-development type?

oh. FUCK.

A and I will be in Fremont for a wedding over that weekend; we're free Friday until 1pmish (later, if closer to Fremont) and Saturday until 11ish (flight out of San Jose at 12:30).

We'll have a rental car and of course public transit options.

We're thinking brunch Saturday? Ideas? Thoughts?

So, my next computer purchase is probably going to be a desktop. Something that is mid-range in the current market, I'd want to spend no more than 1.5k for the box and a decent monitor. I don't really have the time to devote nor the high-school-not-getting-laid-geek patience I used to have to build it myself. I want it to run Linux, and I want it to run it well.

Things I require:
-A virtualized, snappy Windows for those times I want to photoshop and sync my iPhone (wine+iTunes=not reliable). How do I tell if a system supports true virtualization? I want none of this ass-slow emulated shit that my current laptop barely supports via qemu. Also, what's the best practice w/r/t virtualization? One root host OS with virtualized desktop Linux and windows, or Host OS == Desktop Linux? Am I looking at Xen, or buying VMWare? I happen to already have an XP Pro disk+license to use for this purpose.

-I must admit that I really like Compiz/Fusion. It's how I continue to make fun of A's Mac. Having a graphics card that is happy with Linux, including full 3D support, is critical.

-I'd like to be able to have multiple monitors (perhaps down the road?); but my experience thus far with Linux + Compiz + extra monitor has been the Disaster We Do Not Speak Of.

-It should support wireless-n and WPA; I don't think that'll be an issue, but then again, my laptop suddenly stopped recognizing my wifi chip, so...



Any commentary on who's providing the best desktop linux(-compatible) pre-built boxes? Anyone actually selling pre-installed systems worth a damn? (also, if not, why the fuck not?)

I knew nfnitperplexity was on to something:

From Urban Dictionary's "Word of the Day" :

Hiking in Appalachia June 27

To have an extramarrital affair. Stems from the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford(R). Gov. Sanford was thought to be hiking in Appalachia. In actuality, he was having an affair in the South American country of Argentina.

Girl, I just saw Susie's man hiking in Appalachia.


(My mother now subscribes to the UD word of the day emails after the "teabagging" incident.)

Austin peeps: anyone up to meeting me in Llano for some BBQ Saturday?

In case you saw the news : http://www.welovedc.com/2009/06/22/metro-derailment-collision-at-fort-totten-4-dead/

Courtesy of NBC Washington via Twitter & Flickr

DC had a helluva storm 2 weeks back - someone got a good photo of it coming over northern Virginia:
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The past month of constant rain has made the tomato plants Quite Happy:



This plant (photo taken May 17)



Has become this:

On another forum (which seems to be down) there was a long and amusing story on naming the regions of the US (midwest, "the south" and so on)

WikiTravel offers its own view:

Good:
Flat, annual $40 fee. No rental fee - unless you don't return the bike in under 24 hours, when they charge you $550.

Silly:
Though automated, you can't rent a bike before 6am or after 10pm. Yes, that means the DC Metro runs better hours than a fully-automated bike rental kiosk.

You're not supposed to ride the bikes into VA or MD

Bad:

You have to re-rent the bike every 3 hours - which means getting to a rental station, returning the bike, and then re-renting it.

The bikes have a place for a basket, but not a basket. This bike is not a great way to make a quick errands run.

Insane:

The only bike rental kiosks are in super-downtown DC. The coverage area is completely overlapped by good metro and bus access and you could go from one end to the other with a $10 cab fare -- or, you know, walk 30 minutes. There's not even a bike kiosk in Adams-Morgan (top going-out / bar spot without good metro access) or even Georgetown (yuppieville, also without metro access). Combined with the 3 hour time limit and lack of basket, I'm not really sure what the use case they had in mind was.

One of the more outdoorsy things you can manage in the district is renting a kayak from any of the three boathouses and paddlinng around; dodging crew teams and spooking turtles. There's two places in Georgetown proper with the best boat selection, and another place much further out with better scenery, less river traffic, and more color, in the form of the dock lady who manages getting you in a boat and giving you the various lectures about littering and whatnot; all the while cursing like a sailor. I always favored this place, because she's such a ... nice gruffy person? Sure, a bit crazy, but knowledgeable.

I never knew that she was crazy-AWESOME though:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/16/AR2009051602371.html?sub=AR

Cleaning up garbage and litter along the river has been Smith's obsession for a long time. But lately she has been consumed by a new concern: deer shot illegally along the river on National Park Service land.

"Poachers are going wild up there," she said, referring to the area south of Chain Bridge. [...]

The boats are Smith's part-time job, an occupation reduced to a few days a week during the spring fishing season. But her full-time profession is in the forest. She spends most of her days alone on long peregrinations she describes as "just me [messing] around in the woods."

[...] "She's like no other you've ever met," Leisch said. On the river the week before, Smith had severed the head of a dead beaver -- she wanted the skull -- and accidentally broken Leisch's fishing line with the carcass, causing him to lose his only shad lure. "Most people don't have a fishing partner like that," he said, laughing.

Read the article -- there are plenty more great stories in it involving the safe eating of roadkill, cool things she finds in her walks in nature, and so on.

San Angelo is considering switching their NPR station from KUT Austin to the Texas Tech/Lubbock feed.

If you have a second, please drop by http://www.gosanangelo.com/polls/2009/apr/NPRSwitch09/ and vote for KUT (only 90 votes total so far, 54% for KUT!)

My Folks will be forever grateful.

Someone beat me to a twitter account called #FakeSwineFlu.

I'd even written up a series of initial posts for it.

#fakeswineflu transmission: pip<->pig<->human<->human .. human->twitter->human ???

Cheddar next? Jalapenos/salmonella, bacon/swine flu == pepper popper conspiracy

#FakeSwineFlu is god's punishment for lolcats

#FakeSwineFlu outbreak spotted! See [rickroll link] for details

Prolonged masturbation reduces chance of catching #FakeSwineFlu -- the cure is within our grasp!

(and so on)

So, it's been a few absolutely insane weeks at work. Mainly, it's the annual end-of-April insanity as we cajole, threaten and beg our network of partners, grantees, and so on to get on the Global Youth Service Day bandwagon (http://GYSD.org, this weekend) , post their events, and do outreach and such. We call this "mobilization."

It's actually going pretty well this year. Last year our wonderfully horrible web host totally fell through on making a map for us, so it ended up being a nasty hack of Google Spreadsheets and some javascript tricks from the awesome SIMILE project. The tools were all great, just not capable of scaling to the 1000 events we had.

So I got out ahead of at least some of the insanity, learned Drupal, and managed to get a highly functional community mapping site up for this year. I'm actually pretty proud of it. Go visit. You know you want to. We're also blowing that 1000 event number out of the water; we have almost 1800 posted as of today in 60 countries or so (reported so far; the international crowd are always the last to get back to us), and we're lacking a few key batch imports from partners.

(Shameless plug: Drupal kicks some serious ass. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't figured out Taxonomy and Views. Drupal has a fierce learning curve.)

So that's pretty cool. We have events in every continent but Antarctica and Australia, and our website's blocked in China (so clearly, were doing something right).

Plus, we've gotten some serious star power behind it this year - Usher, the Carter Twins, and some girl named Miley Cyrus has all come out with PSAs for GYSD.

So if I've been remiss in posting or emailing, that's probably the reason.

HDR'ed photos from the Paris trip. I use my Canon Powershot 630 with the Canon Hacker's Developer Kit software and QTPFSGUI (best software project name evar?) to tonemap the HDR set.

Translation: ooooh pretty picturessss!

Montmartre:

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